Niho Palaoa
Aloha,
Guests on Tuesday’s Wake up with the Whales Cruise saw almost every Humpback surface activity in the book! We found a pod of two whales shortly after leaving the bay, and while watching these two off our 10:00, another pod of two surfaced and spouted off our 9:00. But our 10:00 whales were in some kind of a competition, so we spent most of the rest of the cruise watching them. We got to see them fight each other with peduncle throws and tail lobs, and even saw some pectoral slaps as they shoved each other around at the surface. The only thing we didn’t see them do is breach, but we saw some other whales breaching out on the horizon line.
Guests on our Signature Whale Watch Cruise got to know a pod of two mature Humpbacks very well. These two whales were cruising along the Kohala coast, so we paralleled them. Their bottom times were relatively short, and they surfaced near us over and over again. When we deployed the hydrophone during this cruise, we could tell there were a lot of singers, but none of them were particularly close by.
Mahalo,
Claire
Ocean Sports Whale Fact of the Day: Traditionally, the Hawaiian people did not hunt whales. It may be because they didn’t like the taste of the meat, or it may be because the spirit of the whale was so powerful…But if a toothed whale did end up on a beach (whether it died at sea and was blown ashore, or actually beached itself), only the ali’i (royalty) were allowed to possess any part of the whale. Carvings made from a whale’s tooth called “Niho Palaoa” brought mana (roughly defined as a spiritual force”) to the both the carver and the wearer of the pendant — see the photo above for a beautiful Niho Palaoa.